February 27, 2013

Y chromosomes of Corded Ware at Wroclaw-Jagodno (SW Poland)

From the paper:

Two teeth coming from fossil human skeletons were examined in the Molecular Technology Institute of Forensic Medicine Department, Wroclaw Medical University. It was stated that both teeth came from two men on the basis of the gene of amelogenin variants study. Determining polymorphisms of SNP type from chromosome Y resulted in categorizing skeleton from grave no. 1 with very high probability into haplogroup G, whereas skeleton from grave no. 2 with very high probability into one of three haplogroups J, I or E*.

Table 2:

It appears that dots represent identity with the reference sequence, so for example M201 has a dot for skeleton 1 which indicates a T at position 15,027,529 (GRCh37) which is the position where this mutation has occurred. So, the attribution of skeleton 1 to haplogroup G seems reasonable, and suggests continuity between the Neolithic population of Europe (where G is over-represented) and this CW individual.

It's not clear to me how skeleton 2 is attributed to J or I or E* on the basis of these SNPs. If anyone can figure it out, post in the comments.Journal of Archaeological Science doi:10.1016/j.jas.2013.02.002

Assessment of late Neolithic pastoralist's life conditions from the Wroclaw-Jagodno site (SW Poland) on the basis of physiological stress markers

Bohdan Gworys et al.

So-called physiological stress markers are extremely valuable in assessing life conditions of old human populations. They constitute effects of adverse environmental conditions, which leave traces on skeleton. Those traces allow for partial assessment of life conditions not only in environmental and social but also cultural aspects for prehistoric populations. The aim of this study is to estimate the influence of general environmental conditions on human organism at the final stage of the Neolithic period – in the Corded Ware culture. Two skeletons discovered in a tumulus on the outskirts of Wroclaw in the Jagodno district have been subjected to assessment. Their age at the moment of death has been determined in both cases on the basis of multi-feature analysis of changes occurring in formation of particular morphologic features of skeleton and teeth. Attention has been paid to the obliteration degree of skull sutures and the surface state of chewing tooth crowns. A comprehensive DNA analysis has been conducted determining sex of the remains. Also bacteriological analysis of the research material has been conducted. Measurements of all available metric features of the skeletons have been performed with the use of the Martin method. Inventory and basic description of the finds accompanying skeleton remains have been carried out as well. Intensity of the following physiological stress markers have been defined and evaluated: Harris lines; cribra orbitalia; cribra cranii. Skull morphology, degree of suture obliteration, surface state of chewing tooth crowns and estimation of degree of bone development of postcranial skeleton indicate that both skeletons detailed age was about 16 – 18 years. Harris lines on the femur were formed in the 2nd and the 3rd year of life and on both tibias – in the 2nd year of life. Obtained results indicate that those people were expose to stress connected with food deficit when they were very young. Poor porotic changes on the skull and isotopic data suggest that their life quality increased at later age.

If the haplogroup assignments are correct, it would tend to disfavor the hypothesis that Corded Ware was a key archaeological culture accounting for the dispersal of Y-DNA haplogroup R1a that is characteristic of most Bronze Age Indo-European populations of Europe, although the sample is far too small to be definitive.

This, in turn, would cast doubt on the Indo-European linguistic affinities of the Corded Ware people which is often assumed.

No, it indicates missing data. The fact that both samples have dashes for M170 and the authors remained unable to rule out haplogroup I for the second sample confirms this.

Deleted speculation about potential strand issues. In this case, it should be safe to rule out R as a possibility for both samples, and to rule out P for skeleton 1. The more fundamental point that more data will be needed before these samples can be assigned haplogroups with any confidence remains.

Sometimes the sheer amount of Haplo G in prehistoric, confirmed, tested samples, makes me think all of Europe was at one point Haplogroup G. The modern concentrations in the Caucasus would thus represent not the original location of Hg G, but the mountains to which they fled (or where they survived).

"No offence, but when will you people stop making connections between two possibly wholly unrelated phenomena. "

We have a much more recent spread of a language group as a analogy, the Bantu expansion. We have a pretty good idea of how fast it spread, and from comparative work on the languages a pretty good idea of the paths the daughter languages took. We also have gentic information on those populations.

As I understand it, by the time you get to SA there's not a whole lot of material from that proto-home in Nigeria left. Why are we so quick to assume some big wave washed in out of aantlia or the Ukraine or wherver and the next morning everyone was speaking some version of IE?

The following assumptions guide the use of genetic data to infer language shift in the absence of historical evidence. There are sometimes close calls, but they are not speculative and do not involve a blind equation of genes and linguistic affinity.

1. Language family shift in a primary (i.e. non-liturgical everyday) language), as distinct from evolution of the language itself over time, is an all or nothing affair, that takes place at a communitywide level because language is social, and does not occur in the absence of a monumentous adoption of a larger cultural package that can be discerned as a new archaelogical culture in an area and always shifts in favor of a superstrate population that includes at least a critical mass of native speakers of the new language.

2. All significant genetic admixture events between previously separated genetic populations involve language shift by the superstrate population, or in rare cases a language shift by both populations to a creole or lingua franca. The one exception involves cases where genetically distinct populations already share a common language due to a historical common superstrate population that has given the populations a shared primary cultural source.

3. Creoles appear only in highly particularized circumstances have a linguistically distinctive profile that were rare in prehistory. Historically attested languages of people who have not experience mass language shifts distinctively accumulate more features that are challenging for second language learners.

4. Archaeological cultures, when properly classified which is usually the case, represent periods in time and space that are in cultural continuity with each other. Language shift only takes place at the beginning of a new archaeological cultural in a particular place.

5. New archaeological cultures accompanied by shifts in population genetics and physical anthropology (particularly in the elite male population) and non-local cultural antecedents tend to involve language shift.

6. Genes, stronium levels in bones, and physical anthropology of elites (particularly men), genetic and stronium indicators of sources of domesticated flora and fauna, comparison of artifact styles (particularly if non-functional), and the sources of non-local trade goods are good indicators of cultural antecedents that are otherwise ambiguous.

7. All major population genetic shifts not involving language shift show genetic continuity exclusively from a subset of the prior population accompanied indications of a selective pressure such as aridity, reduced temperature, flooding, internal warfare, or disease.

8. A linguistic affiliation can be assigned to an archaeological culture and all subsequent linguistic cultures in evolutionary continuity it by tracing it to a historically attested linguistic population. In other cases, the fact of language shift but not the content of the previous language is all that can be determined.

Ancient DNA and modern population genetics tends to indicate that G was intrusive in the Neolithic in Europe from West Asia. Y-DNA I is a good candidate for a common Paleolithic Y-DNA haplogroup. It is found in association with Paleolithic/Mesolithic mtDNA types U5 and V that have of nomadic or fishing populations that adopted farming late, with pre-Neolithic mutation rate based dispersal ages even using mutation rates calibrated by ancient mtDNA H sample (e.g. in the Saami, in the Dutch and Belgians, in populations near the Franco-Cantrabrian refuge, in linguistic Berbers), and in the Balkans which were at the frontier of first adopters of incompletely developed (and hence less obviously superior) Neolithic technological advances where introgression of Paleolithic populations into farming communities would be greatest.

@ Fanty

Thanks. Obvious the data is thin. I and G are common in the first wave Neolithic ancient DNA, suggesting continuity. Core Indo-European populations in Eastern and Central Europe seem to have had a lot of R1a in the Bronze Age. It looks like Corded Ware arose from the first wave Neolithic Funnelbeaker culture (with incorporation of some Mesolithic peoples culturally rather tha demically at the LBK v. Mesolithic frontier) that probably arose in Poland.

A story to explain the three data point regional disparity could be that in East Germany the R1a may have arrived with an early incursion of a plausibly Indo-European the Globular Amphora culture (ca 3400 BCE to 2800 BCE) advacing on the strength of horses rather than metals, was then been subsumed in a non-Indo-European Corded Ware and subsequent series of cultures that followed that gained the advantage with metals, and perhaps didn't flip back to being linguistically Indo-European again until either Tumulus ca. 1600 BCE) or Urnfield cultures arrived (ca. 1300 BCE) (not entirely clear which). Bell Beaker probably didn't reach them in East Germany at least until late. The amber in the post-Corded Ware culture, pre-Tumulus culture Unetice graves in the region (from ca. 2300 BCE) far from the Balkins suggests cultural ties to non-Indo-European Mesolithic peoples for that culture rather than to the Indo-Europeans of the Steppe.

A long story, yes. But, central places between core cultural regions with few natural barriers to incoming peoples would be expected to flip back and forth between cultural spheres over time. After all, East Germany has done just that (realigning itself from Eastern Europe to Western Europe) in my lifetime.

This interpretation would suggest a very late Bronze Age, early Iron Age emergence of Germanic in Europe contemporaneously with Celtic and Italic expansion (and possibly Phyrgean migration to form proto-Armenians) in multiple directions as part of a single Bronze Age collapse expansion in all directions of Indo-European peoples (Slavic expansion, however, would come later after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and overtake pre-existing Indo-Europeans in the same region).

The link between Corded Ware Culture and R1a wasn't made overnight when those samples from the CWC site at Eulau were found to belong to R1a. It was made because the highest frequencies of R1a are today found in parts of Europe where CWC archeological sites are common. So there's very little doubt that the main European subclade of R1a, which is R1a-Z283, was commonly found within the CWC zone. But to see if it was the dominant marker we'll need samples from across the CWC range and from different time periods.

Thank you for your reply. There are many flaws with your assumptions, but one cannot blame you for it given that you have merely re-iterated what even the most 'respectable' scholars themselves regurgitate. Given the time limitations, and the fact that this is not a language blog, I cannot go into it. Suffice it to say, one day ''if'' I get to writing the paper I wish to write on PIE, and ''if'' it gets published I'd love to share it with you .

But as a parting comment, Andrew Garrett recently wrote that Mycenean Greek (c. 2nd M BCE) is 'barely Greek" (ie apart from the unique lexis required for the Aegean physical & cultural millieu); i.e. its morphology, syntax and phonology differ very little to reconstructed PIE. When you combine this with the fact that the idea of a single I-E 'proto-language' existing in a definable 'homeland' is naught but a relict of the methodological failures of the family -tree language dispersal model and the culture-historical(and now genetics) archaeological paradigms, combined with an absence of any evidence to suggest that northern or even central Europe was "Indo-European" until MUCH later in prehistory, the inevitable conclusion is -> PIE spread in Europe later and more gradually than generally envisaged.

To pick on just one of your points, your statement about general cultural continuity from Corded Ware times to later historical periods when we can safely assume an IE language of some sort. What you fail to realise, or define, is what you actually mean by 'cultural continuity'. A 'general cultural continuity' as many scholars sluggishly claim, can actually be argued for Atlantic and Northern Europe to exist way back to the the Mesolithic ! However, under this lies a myriad of discontinuities in local and meso-regional landscape use, settlement patterns and even individual cultural expressions.

@andrew: "4. Archaeological cultures, when properly classified which is usually the case..."

Laughed out loud at that one. Suffice it to say that you're assuming facts not in evidence.

"5. New archaeological cultures accompanied by shifts in population genetics and physical anthropology (particularly in the elite male population) and non-local cultural antecedents tend to involve language shift."

Which, for example, makes the Indo-Aryan invasion hypothesis, the hoary grandfather of all proposed linguistic changes, deeply problematic. Either there was no shift in language or language can indeed shift without leaving a significant change in the material record.

The problem more generally is that, whether individually or in combination, there is nothing in your litany compelling a reasonable observer to accept your conclusions. It's a criterion for justifying what you already believe, not science in any recognizable form.

"...(ca 3400 BCE to 2800 BCE) advacing on the strength of horses rather than metals..."

In 3400 BCE? Extremely unlikely. Empiricism is more than just a good idea, y'know.

We are now at a point where one is almost forced to argue that the PIE reconstructions themselves must be at fault. How do you explain proto Germanic/ Celtic/ Italic/ Greek be so young, while at the same time proto-Iranian is way too close to PIE? Do you propose PIE is really only ~4,000 years old and all the studies about Anatolian and Tocharian are just horribly wrongly dated?

It looks to me that PIE reconstructions are (obviously) heavily biased towards best-known writings, which are largely not very old, and thus create an artificial origin language that is way closer to the various proto-languages and way younger than it should be and likely was.

It is difficult enough to envision such a wide spread of IE through heavily populated agricultural areas before the advent of standing armies. It is even more difficult to envision to have taken place during the late phases of the bronze age, when locally distinct cultures were well-established. In fact, the only thing that unites all regions in which IE is spoken is the spread of the bronze age - so PIE must be considerably older.

Andrew,

Horses were not important during that time (not until Celtic/Roman times)in North/ Central Europe, because they could not be used in transportation (no roads, but swamps and thick forests), and placed a huge burden on their keepers (unlike in the steppes, they could not graze for ~5 months/ year and needed shelter and high-quality fodder grown and harvested for them - food that was needed for cattle and people).

@eurologist: "We are now at a point where one is almost forced to argue that the PIE reconstructions themselves must be at fault."

To benighted souls like me, that's seemed obvious for some time. Barrels of ink have been spilled over this problem and there's still no dispositive answer in sight. We should at least consider the possibility that we have been asking the wrong questions.

"It is difficult enough to envision such a wide spread of IE through heavily populated agricultural areas before the advent of standing armies."

What of Bell-Beaker? Setting aside the question of what language they spoke, the culture seems to have had no difficulty spreading across a substantial part of Europe in just such a time period.

"It is even more difficult to envision to have taken place during the late phases of the bronze age, when locally distinct cultures were well-established. In fact, the only thing that unites all regions in which IE is spoken is the spread of the bronze age - so PIE must be considerably older."

Are you suggesting a connection between PIE and bronze technology? Or are you merely suggesting that the spread of PIE was a Bronze-Age phenomenon?

"Horses were not important during that time...in North/ Central Europe, because they could not be used in transportation...and placed a huge burden on their keepers..."

I think that is a very important point, one that bears emphasizing. The horse was of little use in the East until quite late, as well. For instance the Shang Dynasty left behind probably the richest chariot burials of the ancient world, yet aside from its use as a command platform, there is no evidence that the horse and chariot played any tactical role on the battlefield throughout that era. The Zhou may have enjoyed a tactical advantage over the Shang through the development of chariot tactics, but even then as an effective weapon its history was surprisingly brief.

It is tempting to think that the horse and chariot were more status symbol than weapon, at least at first. The stratification of society and trade in luxury goods seem to be hallmarks of the Bronze Age.

At the time of their death Europe had no borders as we have them especially since 1948 when Silesia officially became governed by Poland and Breslau for instance despite its long history as a German speaking city had its name changed to Wroclaw. Interesting that ancient Silesia the region was also inhabited also by the Celts. SW Poland as mentioned in this blog has only been so since 1948 three years after WW2 ended.

What of Bell-Beaker? Setting aside the question of what language they spoke, the culture seems to have had no difficulty spreading across a substantial part of Europe in just such a time period.

It wasn't really much of a culture, but more of a trade group that managed to "infiltrate" local agriculturalists at the 5% to 10% range, for the most part, and in only ~20% or so of Europe. Not something that would influence autosomal or uniparental DNA in any appreciable way.

Are you suggesting a connection between PIE and bronze technology? Or are you merely suggesting that the spread of PIE was a Bronze-Age phenomenon?

Both - but at a late stage. There is no denying it: Bronze-Age technology was it and hugely changed material culture. But we should not forget that it took place during different times, regionally, and that whatever proto-PIE precursor must have lived a long time before the beginning of any highly-localized, centralized bronze-age spread.

It's not that I think proto-Iranian is too close to PIE - it's the way it and proto-Indo-Iranian are reconstructed: proto-Iranian and proto-Indic/ Vedic Sanskrit are made almost identical and are made almost identical to proto-Indo-Iranian (PII), and then placed just about ~1,000 years after PIE by many scholars. And during this short time, supposedly evolved sound shifts that also occur in Greek and others in Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, and Armenian - which places it in close contact with almost all E and SE IE languages during ~3,000 to 2,000 BCE - that is just crazy late. There simply was no homogeneous circum-Pontic super-culture during that time.

To me, these reconstructions are simply too close to each other and too close to PIE at too late of a time frame. In my view, there is evidence that Balkan and Central European IE branched off 500 to 1,000 years before this supposed PII branching-off date. The current datings and similarities of reconstructed PIE sub-groups make no sense; they are IMO artifacts of (i) indiscriminantly using old written languages by arbitrarily selecting the shortest path that connects them as a progenitor, and (ii), by at least some, trying to force the time frame to fit a Kurgan-PIE connection.

Ok, but you seem to have changed your claim. Before, it was Iranian specifically that was particularly close to IE (hence my astonishment), now it is Proto-Indo-Aryan. Your "Iranian" claim was in fact quite peculiar and apparently impressionistic, as I haven't seen it in linguistic sources before. Proto-Iranian initial consonants, for one, changed a lot more than those of Sanskrit, for example...

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Now, IF the PIE reconstructions are indeed wrong, it is obviously because of that point (i) you raised, but that "suspicion" is nothing new, and it has been discussed to death since the beginning of the 20th century.

In short, the problem is that apart from a) relying on the earliest written sources and b) internal reconstructions, there is no other way. These limitations are similar to those faced by archaeologists - scientists have to live with them. There is no clear-cut solution to this problem - any attempt at "magically" solving it with the current data and current methodology would involve unwarranted speculation. Having a "hunch" that Indo-Europeans "were supposed" to be in such and such a place earlier based on unverifiable links between languages and archaeology will not do. Any claimed link would have to be extremely strong and obvious and based on very specific evidence.

Let us take Germanic languages, for example: they are attested relatively late, and at a time many of them might have been displaced, and we can't reconstruct anything going beyond 400 BCE. It is quite likely that the precursor to PG and also many sisters to it were spoken in northern Europe or the Balkans long before 400 BCE, that there was a lot more diversity, that pre-PG was much closer to PIE, AND that it might have odd features that would demand a major change in PIE reconstructions. However, we have no direct evidence. And there is no way around that.

And, obviously, languages for which sources are dated to 1000BCE and earlier (e.g., Vedic) should be closer to PIE and hold more clues to it than a language attested in ~400CE (e.g., Gothic). Given the only slightly younger sources for Avestan, the split of I-A and of I-A from PIE can be securely dated to the time frame you mentioned. I don't see any problem with that.

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As for your other points, I really think you are making an exaggeration.

1) The main sound change common to all those language groups is the loss of laryngeals and subsequent development of vowel coloring and/or consonant aspiration, which for all we know could already be in its early stages by the time non-Anatolian, non-Tocharian IE began to split.

2) There are many similarities between them that simply reflect the early attestation of Greek and Indo-Aryan and the conservativeness of some other groups such as Baltic - in other words, they are shared retentions, which have nothing to do with branching and/or Sprachbünde.

3) Some shared sound changes between Greek, Armenian and Iranian (change of *s>h) and Indo-Aryan and Baltic/Slavic (satemisation) seem to have spread either late or only very gradually. For example, satemisation is incomplete in several Slavic and Baltic IE cognates, and only partial/sporadic in Albanian and Armenian.

In other words, the isogloss scenario appears to be far less dramatic than what you claim.

4) Finally, the accusation that reconstructions were done with a Kurgan model in mind is absurd - by far most major details of the PIE reconstruction had already been worked out long before the Kurgan hypothesis.

@eurologist: "[Bell-Beaker] wasn't really much of a culture, but more of a trade group that managed to 'infiltrate' local agriculturalists...[not] something that would influence autosomal or uniparental DNA in any appreciable way."

Archaeologically, it is a distinct material culture and we were discussing the spread of language, not genetics. You said that it was difficult to imagine the spread of Indo-European through a settled population at such an early date. Here we at least have an intrusive culture spreading through a settled population, one that conceivably might have carried a distinct language along with it, whatever that language might have been.

"There is no denying it: Bronze-Age technology was it and hugely changed material culture."

I agree that the change in material culture was profound, having the sort of outsized impact that is often -- I think erroneously -- attributed to the spread of horse culture.

"But we should not forget that it took place during different times, regionally, and that whatever proto-PIE precursor must have lived a long time before the beginning of any highly-localized, centralized bronze-age spread."

I think it's even a bit more problematic than that. Bronze technology itself was an evolutionary development of the copper industry, which seems to begin more-or-less simultaneously in south-east Europe and Iran. The Bronze Age seems more like a revolutionary increase in the scale and complexity of society. While I am open to the idea that metallurgy played an essential role in that change, it's a thesis in want of further development.

@Ezr: "Finally, the accusation that reconstructions were done with a Kurgan model in mind is absurd - by far most major details of the PIE reconstruction had already been worked out long before the Kurgan hypothesis."

Not quite what he said, is it? The details of reconstruction and the timing of PIE are not necessarily the same thing. All modern discussions known to me revolve around when, where, and by whom, the horse was domesticated and first hitched to a wheeled vehicle.

I'm sorry, but it's you who seem to be somewhat confused about this. First of all, I was talking about phonological change and lexical similarity, not historical semantics, which is much more speculative.Secondly, there is a fundamental difference between the original outline of the reconstructions and their modern interpretation, which you seem to have ignored in your comment.

The roots in question (again, their phonology and semantic core) were reconstructed long before the Kurgan Hypothesis. Their polemical association with particular cultural objects and the timing of the PIE split is a contemporary debate that has nothing to do with the soundness of the original reconstruction.

All I'm saying is that you two are being anachronistic.

A final note: let's not be fooled by the anti-Gray&Atkinson etc. vitriol. Despite what some here seem to think from reading only the recent debates, linguists are not "obsessed" with a "Steppe charioteer" model. There are many other models floating around, some of which are even popular (not the Anatolian one, though, and for very good reasons - methodology and evidence-wise - that are not dependent on the "wheel" reconstruction).

Sometimes, that's a good thing. Not, obviously, in the sense of the history of science, but in the sense of developing new connections out of both old and new ideas.

I happen to believe that computational linguistics has its place and can make important contributions. I also have seen that pretty much all computational linguistic results place PIE and proto- or pre-proto subgroups at a much earlier time frame than many conventional linguists do, and especially anything a Kurgan model would imply.

If there had been a central Pontic island of importance, the number one theory today would be that PIE originated there - because almost all ancient and existing IE languages appear to be radiating from it. Lacking such a place, we need to look at the most densely populated and most influential areas around the Black Sea as a source. This leaves the W and SW (and adjacent Anatolia) as the only areas that stand out in terms of early high population density, social stratification, personal enrichment, and cultural advancement.

I don't think such thoughts are speculation - I think such ideas emerge from fruitfully combining evidence from a number of different fields, without prejudice or overbearing scholastic burden.

I still regard the connection between the West_Asian autosomal component and IE languages as quite obvious. Now according to Dienekes' Rolloff experiments the main admixture event between the West_Asian component and the Baltic Lithuanians took place at quite an early date, about 3800 BC, or 4300 BC, using another West_Asian group. The same with Ukrainians whose Rolloff date was 3530 BC. This points to a an influence stemming presumably from the Maykop culture, which linked southern Russia with the area south of the Caucasus and wich was regarded as a decisive factor in the Indoeuropeanization of the Globular Amphora culture by Marija Gimbutas. Furthermore, even though the central European Corded People differed physically quite substantially from the Pit Grave-/Steppe type (because of the old neolithic substrate), the Corded people in the Baltic region were more similar to the latter.To me this makes the assumption of an already Indoeuropeanized Corded Ware somewhat likely.

But I have to admit that from the point of view of physical anthropology, there was also a later, bronze age invasion of the Baltic, which brought the much narrower faced Nordid (and Nordomediterranid) types there. This may have increased the amount of haplogroup R1a in the Baltic, and may also have been accompanied by some linguistic change. But these later invaders were not substantially West_Asian autosomally, hence the early Rolloff date is saved. But of course, in all likelihood they were Indoeuropeans and somewhat West_Asian admixed, too.

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